Reintroduce Jump Drives, or, Built-in Jump is Still Wierd.

[lupoCani]

As it stands, there are two main kinds of systems. There are shields and thrusters and the like, which exist on their own, and can be boosted and modified in various ways by chambers. Then, there are cloaks and scanners and so on, which are provided entirely by the chambers that relate to them.

I propose that jump drives belong to the former category, not the second.

Firstly, there's the concept of it. Jump drives are an integral part of the game, and FTL drives in general are an integral part of the common conception of spacecraft. Having it consist entirely of stat modifications to a reactor is, in my opinion, no fun. At least, not compared to having an actual chunk of nice, blinking blocks near the core of your ships labeled "hyperdrive".

Second, there's the practical aspect. Having a system with block counts allow for variability. In the case of jump drives, this would a power/speed tradeoff. Currently, a ship is stuck with a minimum speed and minimum power consumption depending on mass. With an actual system, one could simply install half the amount of drive blocks for half the speed and half the power consumption.

Third, details and caveats. We should probably aim for a simple, linear system, where charge speed equals jump drive blocks divided by ship mass, up to a set cap of whatever it is the regular charge speed is nowadays. Any improvement beyond that would have to come from chambers. There should probably not be a lower cap, since that would defeat the power/speed tradeoff thing. In order not to annoy people too much, a 100%-sized drive should probably be a lot smaller than the typical reactor in the same ship - there shouldn't be another huge blob alongside stabilizers, reactors, shields and weapons. To avoid chain drives and the like, put in some simple limitation like one charging drive disrupting/draining any others.

I think that's it, for now. I know this has been brought up before, so I guess this will be one of these recurring suggestions for the foreseeable future.

 

[Dire Venom]

Apparently they did it for "simplicity" despite you only needing to place down 2 blocks -_-
If anything it's less intuative or fun to deal with and just plain pisses me off as a mechanic lol.

 

[Lord Daro]

Apparently they did it for "simplicity" despite you only needing to place down 2 blocks -_-

Another big reason was to remove chain drives entirely, because in extrem cases they could lag a server to death.
However, I too think it feels pretty weird that essentially every little scooter got a build in jump drive.

 

[Captain Fortius]

Yes indeed.

I like to decide which ship should have a big, fast hyperdrive and which shouldn't. A ship made for interstellar travel is built differently than a small fighter craft or an in-system boat.

And spaceships in every damn movie, TV , novel series I know of have clearly identifyable jump drives or hyperspace engines or whatever. Often very large ones.

The more I hear about this update, the less I like it. What happened? Did they sit around a table, realize they'll never finish the game, so they try their best to make us hate it so much we'll abandon it before they do?

If not, our cat-person should really fire all the hanger-ons who gathered around him over the years because they clearly do not know or care about what makes a game fun! They also never watched, played or read ANY science fiction material.

And once he's at it, get rid of the community managers who know nothing about the community and are regularly surprised by ages old issues when by chance they happen upon it.

Edit:
Chain drives could (and should) have been killed off by disallowing more than one jump drive computer on any ship. It's not even unprecedented: We can only have one scanner, one cloaker, one jammer. And when distance becomes a non-factor due to near-instantenous travel to any location, it messes with game balance, as well as server performance.

 

[MacThule]

If not, our cat-person should really fire all the hanger-ons who gathered around him over the years

Yup. And actually, I get the impression that at this point it's mainly him with a little help from Criss, Duke & Lancake.

 

[NeonSturm]

I liked originally that you don't need these 2 blocks for small craft.

But now you have a conduit as computer and ftl-chamber as FTL-blocks.

Perhaps you can set the default warp distance to 0 :D

 

[Micro753]

I like to decide which ship should have a big, fast hyperdrive and which shouldn't. A ship made for interstellar travel is built differently than a small fighter craft or an in-system boat.

And spaceships in every damn movie, TV , novel series I know of have clearly identifyable jump drives or hyperspace engines or whatever. Often very large ones.

I like the new system in concept. You can't decide to leave out a jump drive anymore, but the built in one is weak, isn't it? And large ships would have chambers to make it better. So a fighter can still jump (reminds me of Star Wars where each x-wing had it's own hyperdrive even though they were one person fighters), but it can't go as far or fast as a ship with chambers dedicated to it.

Of course, I haven't messed with them too much yet, so I might change my mind once I figure out the quirks of this new system.

 

[Dire Venom]

Previously your Jump Charge was dependent on the proportion of JDs vs total mass (I think), thus you could have whatever charge speed desired as long ad you had the energy and could dedicate (x%) of your ship to it.

Now you are either stuck with a very weak Jumpdrive, or you have to spend your limited reactor points on making the Charge time bearable -_-

 

[JNC]

The old JD system was lame (aside from the cool animation) BUT I did very much like being able to build an actual JD system (not some reactor addon) and I don't see an issue with multiple jump drives. As Captain Fortius said, JDs are usually big and/or demanding systems so if a ship has several than it has made sacrifices in other areas of its design in order to do so... and if you want to stop someone from jumping everywhere build inhibitors! That's what they're for!

 

[Captain Fortius]

See, I wouldn't mind multiple jump drives either if they really were big, and truly a sacrifice in that ship's capacity for other stuff.
Except their several jump drives were each but a few blocks in size and logic triggering did the rest.

Even the concept was interesting. Why not have two or more? But as always, people learned to exploit it, and the best way for eliminating chain drives is eliminating multiple jump drives. You could disallow logic triggering, but I believe that'd be a worse limit.

And you can't have an inhibitor fleet follow everyone everywhere all the time who'd use jump drives to zig-zag through the galaxy from end to end ( or between two galaxies for putting extra strain on the server).

But thanks for partially agreeing

 

[Coyote27]

What's wrong with chain drives? How are they an "exploit?" They never gave anyone an unfair advantage... they just make the game less of a pain-in-the-ass to travel around and thus were good for the game. Not bad.
Why should the galaxy be more tedious and slower to fly around in, and require more clicking and micromanagement to do it? Does it make the game better or more fun or more balanced if it takes longer to travel from A to B and you have to sit around holding the mouse button waiting for your jump drive to manually charge up?

Someone explain this thought process to me.

 

[troll82]

the problem in the new system is the rc, you can have only limited amount of chamberuse. only to activate all chambers of jumpdrive its round 40 or 50 % of a chambercapacity on 1 reactor, thats iff you want it fully functional as in old. Not even the scanner or the reactor is boosted so you will loose tons of good funtioning systems compared to old. i dont even call it a upgrade. Its a massive downgrade. Id rather say they created a whole new game instead of upgrading starmade.

 

[Captain Fortius]

What's wrong with chain drives? How are they an "exploit?"

Not that this hasn't been explained in the previous posts, but how is putting undue strain on the server and teleporting to anywhere near-instantenously is NOT a problem and an exploit?

A certain time factor must be involved in travel, otherwise the system is open for abuse; eliminating tactical choices or any risk and investment, and only giving rewards.

The most basic example:

One could just zig-zag around until he finds a sufficiently vulnerable target, do something nasty, then escape in moments to literally any place in the universe, thus negating any possibility of defense or retalliation.
Of course it's the basic hit&run principle, which in itself is a tactic that you should be totally free to use when you want, but the means the game gave you for getting to and escaping from the target zone are not in balance with the means of countering such actions.

The second one being, you can't believe it's good for the game engine to load up a new star system every two seconds?

By the way, this would be one of those "I can't believe why I have to explain it's better to walk with your legs instead of your hands" moments, except I've seen enough forum BS to easily believe you needed this explanation and will still refuse to understand.

 

[NeonSturm]

Now you are either stuck with a very weak Jumpdrive, or you have to spend your limited reactor points on making the Charge time bearable -_-

Or you can make a jump-reactor to boot before jumps.
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What's wrong with chain drives? How are they an "exploit?" They never gave anyone an unfair advantage... they just make the game less of a pain-in-the-ass to travel around and thus were good for the game. Not bad.
Why should the galaxy be more tedious and slower to fly around in, and require more clicking and micromanagement to do it? Does it make the game better or more fun or more balanced if it takes longer to travel from A to B and you have to sit around holding the mouse button waiting for your jump drive to manually charge up?

Someone explain this thought process to me.

It was done to give gates a greater use I guess.

 

[JinM]

Every - really every - ship I ever build gets a jump drive. Even my smallest scouts had a jd computer on it. It was the most tedious thing for me, when I had to buy jump drive modules right at the start of the game. Now it's just part of every ship, like everyone builds their jumpdrives anyway.

Additionally: Now you have to think wether your ship is able to move around quickly, or if it is dedicated to fighting. Smaller ships can't afford the space of a second reactor and rely on carriers now if they are dedicated for fighting instead of scouting.

What's wrong with chain drives? How are they an "exploit?" They never gave anyone an unfair advantage... they just make the game less of a pain-in-the-ass to travel around and thus were good for the game. Not bad.
Why should the galaxy be more tedious and slower to fly around in, and require more clicking and micromanagement to do it? Does it make the game better or more fun or more balanced if it takes longer to travel from A to B and you have to sit around holding the mouse button waiting for your jump drive to manually charge up?

Someone explain this thought process to me.

1. Chain Drives can break with each update changing a related mechanic, for example rail rotators.
They are bound to the coherent work of different old mechanics such as rails and logic. And such game mechanic bound game elements can allways break with each update.
For example Minecraft redstone contraptions had allways a high chance of breaking with each update, as some mechanic or bug got changed or fixed. And the same problem have chain drives.


2. Chain drives were the most unintuitive part of Starmade.
2.a) You had to read a lot to manufacture one yourself. I am playing Starmade for over a year and still didn't bother to spend this wasted hour into learning how to build one.
Did you ever build one yourself? I guess not. Because they are a too complicated game element...Just go around and ask how big the percentage of players is, that pasted jump drives in from the CC or friends, instead of building the complex logic by themself.

2.b) Additionally moving around quickly should be easily accessible early on for everyone, as it is a basic reward. It's just basic comfortability that shouldn't be restricted with a tedious outside of the game "knowledge quest". Moving around quickly isn't a big reward that justifies such a complicated artificial "study tutorials on youtube quest". Other game elements, like building a powerfull big ship, should be the real quests to accomplish.

3. Chain Drives could be considered as logic bombs and unneccessary perfomance hit.

 

[Calhoun]

2. Chain drives were the most unintuitive part of Starmade.

I fail to see what's unintuitive about making a logic clock and attaching it to a couple of jumpdrives.

 

[JinM]

I fail to see what's unintuitive about making a logic clock and attaching it to a couple of jumpdrives.

Because you can't remember how it was to learn this game 2 years ago. No offense. It's just very hard for new players to figure it.

 

[Valiant70]

It bothers me that I have to use up so much of my chamber capacity in order to have a non-garbage jump drive. I'm definitely in favor of it being a separate system.

 

[JinM]

It bothers me that I have to use up so much of my chamber capacity in order to have a non-garbage jump drive. I'm definitely in favor of it being a separate system.

Does using a second reactor work for you? Did you try it out?

I can imagine that a second one would take up a lot of space, but I didn't try it out myself. I am just currious how 2 reactor ships would feel and how others perceive them.

Maybe, if 2 reactor strats are not cool for everyone, we could suggest to lower the points needed for a good jd, or we could suggest to make the usage of 2 reactors more viable.

 

[Valiant70]

Does using a second reactor work for you? Did you try it out?

I can imagine that a second one would take up a lot of space, but I didn't try it out myself. I am just currious how 2 reactor ships would feel and how others perceive them.

Maybe, if 2 reactor strats are not cool for everyone, we could suggest to lower the points needed for a good jd, or we could suggest to make the usage of 2 reactors more viable.

I would very much prefer not to have two reactors on a general-purpose ship. They're heavy! It would be better if the game were balanced so that only ships with specialized roles like perma-stealth need a second reactor for anything.